Even with the relatively recent proliferation of email, instant messaging, and similar communication technologies, telephone services remain important to an average person or business. Indeed, it appears that the number of individual telephone lines in use is constantly increasing. The number and sophistication of feature functions available from both telephone systems and telephone service providers also continue to increase. Call answering, voice messaging, and automated attendant (auto attendant) are some of the more popular feature functions commonly offered by telephone systems and service providers.
An auto attendant system typically answers the incoming calls, greets the callers, and transfers the calls to selected extensions. Some auto attendant systems interact with the callers using, for example, dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF or touch-tone) key input. Other auto attendant systems accept voice input, which they process using automatic speech recognition. Still other systems can receive and process both DTMF and voice input. Representative auto attendant systems of all three types can support call screening. For example, an auto attendant system can request a caller to identify himself (or herself, as the case may be), record the caller's response, play the response to the called party, and allow the called party to accept or reject the call.
An auto attendant system's functionality can be further extended with a so-called “locate” feature, which allows the caller to reach the called party-subscriber at one or more programmable telephone numbers, such as the subscriber's home or mobile telephone numbers. CallXpress™ Call Manager product of the assignee of this invention and other products further extended this functionality to graphical user interface (GUI) screen pop-ups, and added other identification means, such as using the automatic number identification (ANI) number of a call to look up a name in a contact database in order to pop-up the caller's name on the subscriber's screen.
When the called party-subscriber chooses not to take the call, the caller generally does not have a simple and easy way to find out when the called party gets the message. This can be frustrating for the caller. This can also be annoying for the called party, because the call is terminated without giving the called party an opportunity to respond to the call, except by actually taking the call.
To increase the number of options available to the called party, some call processing systems allow the called party to prerecord a number of outgoing messages. The system can select a specific outgoing message based, for example, on the caller identification, on the time of day, on the date, day of the week, or a combination of these and similar variables.
This feature may also allow the called party to prerecord a detailed personalized message for a particular caller, and store the message in a voice mailbox assigned to the caller. After a call is received and the particular caller is identified, the caller can be routed to the mailbox to receive the personalized message. Based on the nature of the prerecorded message, the caller may, for example, call again at a later time, leave a detailed message for the called party, or simply hang up.
Providing prerecorded personalized messages may be an improvement on the art, but the caller is still left without knowledge of when the called party hears the caller's message. Moreover, because the messages are prerecorded, they do not provide the called party an opportunity to respond to the specific call, except by taking the call; the caller can thus receive a stale message or a message irrelevant under the circumstances. Another potential problem with this scheme is caller misidentification, which may cause a prerecorded message to be played to an unintended recipient.
Quite often situations arise when the called party would prefer to acknowledge the call by providing information that is not carried by a prerecorded message, without, however, engaging in a conversation with the caller. For example, the called party may be busy attending a meeting or engaging in other important matters, but still would like the caller to know that the called party knows about the call. Furthermore, the called party may want to provide the caller with additional information while the caller is still on the telephone, without, however, speaking with the caller. Depending on the circumstances, the called party may also wish to receive the caller's response to the personalized acknowledgement message.